How to use PowerPoint morph with multiple objects

PowerPoint’s morph transition really is a game-changing feature in the world of presentations. You no longer have to be a presentation animation expert to create dynamic and eye-catching content. We’ve written a guide on using morph, and you can read that here. But even though we love this feature, it’s not without it’s faults. So here’s a handy tip for using PowerPoint morph with multiple objects.

How PowerPoint morph works

At a basic level, morph recognises common objects that appear across multiple slides and animates them to create lovely, smooth transitions like this:

The difficulty of morphing multiple objects

Morph is especially helpful if you want to animate multiple objects across multiple slides; it saves you having to animate each object individually. But sometimes PowerPoint isn’t that great at recognising which object is which when you morph it – particularly if you have several of the same type of object (e.g. multiple rectangles).

In the image below we have three slides with different arrangements of the same shapes. Let’s say we want to move the shapes on Slide 1 to the formation on Slide 3, via the formation on Slide 2.

But if we create the three slides above, and add a morph transition to each, this is what happens:

PowerPoint can’t recognise which rectangle is moving to which position, so we get a jumbled mess instead of the smooth transition we want.

How to morph multiple objects

Step 1: The solution, you’ll be glad to know, is simple. Add a letter to each shape. Now, PowerPoint can recognise which shapes are the same when it morphs them.

Step 2: Now we can make the text transparent (so that it doesn’t spoil your lovely design). To do that, select the objects, navigate to the ‘Format’ tab. Select ‘Text Fill’ and then choose the ‘No Fill’ option.

Step 3: Add the morph transition and watch your shapes effortlessly glide to their new (and correct) position.

If you loved this tip, take your morphing skills another level with this tutorial that will teach you how to use morph to animate a 3D Death Star.